How They Lived

Rock ’n’ roll would never have rocked without
Les Paul (b. 1915). He invented the solid-body electric guitar,
building his first in 1940. It’s hard to imagine where Buddy Holly, Bruce
Springsteen, or Jimmy Page would be without the Fender
Strat, the Fender Tele, and the Gibson Les Paul, all
first built in the ’50s. Paul also invented multi-track recording, which
transformed the record industry. Either contribution alone would have been
enough to cement his legend, but the two together, well, they simply

Walter
Cronkite
(b. 1916) defined the role of the network anchor. But he
may have done his job too well. Rather than breaking the mold, he
became the mold, and his achievement
today seems far less extraordinary than it did a few decades ago. Anchors like
Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Ted Koppel all performed their
duties with such dignity and style that it’s easy to forget that they modeled
themselves after “the
most trusted man in America.”

The
American scientist Norman Borlaug
(b. 1914) wasn’t satisfied with Mother Nature . If people around the world were starving, he
figured, why not increase their crop yields? So he cross-bred
new varieties of wheat and rice, and by the early 1960s the so-called

He was
the first African-American to serve as the chairman of a university history
department, but that’s not what makes

It’s no
small thing to change the way a generation eats, but
Sheila Lukins (b.
1942), co-author of the Silver
Palate Cookbook and its many sequels, is in the same league as
culinary upstarts like Irma Rombauer and Julia Child. The
Silver Palate Cookbook, co-written with
Julee Rosso and published
in 1982, was the first cookbook designed for a truly feminist generation:
working women who wanted to serve sophisticated food but didn’t have hours to
spend preparing it. It’s still a brisk seller, and countless guests, served the easy-to-make

The
postwar suburban boom was the product of new highways, cheap cars, and the G.
I. Bill. But once you had the two-car garage, you needed to drive somewhere.
That’s where Melvin Simon
(b. 1926) came in. The Bronx-born, Indianapolis-based real estate developer
built the first strip mall in 1960, then used the
profits to build another. As the country expanded, he did, too, building
grander, enclosed shopping malls, including the

Was
Robert McNamara
a hero or villain? One of JFK’s best and brightest, he
managed to get the lion’s share of the blame for Vietnam. Unlike many of his
colleagues, though, he eventually
came to blame himself. Can his arrogance and lies ever be excused? Not
really. But those final years of relentless truth-telling made him an unusual
figure in American life.

From an early age,
Stanley Kaplan (b. 1919) suspected that the SAT had built-in
biases, favoring affluent students over immigrants and the poor. His inexpensive
courses leveled the playing field, and Stanley H. Kaplan Inc. became known as
“the poor man’s private school.” As his empire grew, fees steepened, and
ironically, Kaplan courses are now out of
reach for many of the students who could benefit from them most. Still, through
his methodical approach to standardized tests, Kaplan forever upended the
notion that test-taking excellence cannot be taught.

George
Tiller (b. 1941) was a happy abortionist. For three decades,
he was one of
the few doctors in the country to whom women could turn for an abortion late in
a pregnancy. He unapologetically performed late-term abortions in his Wichita,
Kansas, clinic, until this year, when he was shot in his own church by an
anti-abortion zealot. His thoughtful approach to abortion,
and the shocking circumstances of his death, have made him the
pro-choice movement's most important martyr.

Irving
Kristol (b. 1920) may not have been the
sole inventor of neo-conservatism, but he presided over the movement and
nurtured it in ways that were his alone. Kristol and
his colleagues—a small group of New York Jewish intellectuals and an even
smaller contingent of goyish fellow
travelers—used ideas, not political demagoguery, to change the world.
That his movement gets credited or blamed for everything from the Reagan
Revolution to welfare reform to the war in Iraq is testimony to his impact.

No 2009
deaths caused more commentary and grief than those of
Michael Jackson (b. 1958) and
Ted Kennedy (b. 1932). Both of
these giants led tortured lives, and it’s very possible that each will be
remembered as much for his tragedies as his triumphs. As future generations
listen to Thriller
or look back at Kennedy’s civil service, they will likely dwell on what might
have been—if Jackson had avoided self-destruction or Kennedy had
undergone his inner transformation earlier in life.

According
to Mel Brooks, Larry
Gelbart (b. 1928) was “the fastest wit in
the west, maybe the fastest wit in the world.” He wrote for Sid Caesar in the
50s, wrote Broadway hits like A
Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in the 60s, wrote
the longrunning series M*A*S*H
in the 70s, the film Tootsie in the 80s,
and another hit musical comedy, City of Angels, in
the 90s. Along with Brooks, Woody Allen, and Carl Reiner, Gelbart
presided over a finite, 50-year period in American Jewish humor, one that is
only now, with his death, drawing to a close.

John
Hughes
(b. 1950) was the Truffaut of teendom.
In Hollywood, a factory town, he was able to author distinctive, personal work,
directing eight films in the ’80s—including The Breakfast Cluband
Pretty in Pink—that
became touchstones for practically every suburban white kid of the era. The
Hughes machine (he also wrote
close to 30 films) abruptly shut down in 1994, when Hughes quit the business at
the age of 44. The result was a peculiarly truncated career—now you see
him, now you don’t—but the adults whose adolescence he helped define
certainly won’t forget
about him.

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